The EU may mandate interoperability, but I don't see them mandating bubble color...
As far as your second point, well… I guess that’s precisely the attitude I was addressing. I definitely don’t agree that a phone brand is as strong an indicator of personality traits as the example you offer. If I was say, hiring a UI designer, I’d perhaps care about their choice of OS. For relationships, I don’t really care if they’re passionate about mobile phones. I understand that most of us on HN are keyed in to tech and UI. The average person, though, sees a phone as a utilitarian item, and owns one as a means to accomplish specific tasks. That way of thinking is like, if someone was a mechanic and thought poorly of a someone they met because they drove a Ford instead of a Mazda and the mechanic believed Mazda had more elegant engine designs.
iPhones: so exclusive that hordes of unemployed teenagers have them.
> I’ve had a couple girlfriends in their 40s mildly judge me negatively for having an Android phone […]
I have an iPhone but don't tie it into Apple services so every fellow iPhone users have green-bubble interactions with me. :)
Over the years/decades I've lived through ICQ, MSN Messenger, BBM, and probably some other proprietary systems. I've managed to avoid tying into any of them so far.
That’s ridiculous!
If it were up to me, encrypted RCS would be blue and not-encrypted RCS would be green.
Grey and Green means not encrypted. Simple.
You could say "blue means it supports link embedding; green means it doesn't" and it would be just as true.
Personally, I strongly suspect that Apple views it as "blue means Apple; green means NIH."
> If you see a green message bubble instead of a blue one, then that message was sent using MMS/SMS instead of iMessage.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105087
> iMessages are texts, photos, or videos that you send to another iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac over Wi-Fi or cellular-data networks. These messages are always encrypted and appear in blue text bubbles.
I can’t imagine all of the carriers cooperating on key management. That’s probably why some carriers have opted to use Google’s solution instead of their own. I would guess encryption isn’t an option if your carrier isn’t in this group.
FWIW, the 350+ page standard is here: https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
I find this absolutely hilarious and almost beautiful: Google has been harassing Apple to implement RCS because it's an open standard and because its users feel green bubbles on iMessage are exclusionary. Now Google has implemented a proprietary protocol on top of RCS that only works with its messaging app, and only messages sent between users of that app appear in a darker blue color with a special lock icon.
So Apple will ship the RCS standard in iMessage, and communication between Android users and iMessage will be sent using RCS, but iMessage users will appear to Android users in the lesser light blue bubbles alongside the dark blue bubbles only given to Android users with Google's proprietary app! Huzzah!
What do you mean? If Apple includes RCS like they did SMS then it would operate as follows:
Is target an iPhone with iMessage enabled? Yes? Use iMessage. No? Fallback to RCS. RCS doesn’t work? Fallback to SMS.
But I guess it was worth to try this instead of directly opening iMessage for interop, for business reasons.
Even carriers that supported RCS, like Vodafone, have shut it down https://9to5google.com/2023/03/27/vodafone-rcs-messages-andr...
Apple won't make the iPhone fall back to sending RCS though Google servers (like Android does) if there isn't carrier support for it, they'll just say "there is no RCS support on your carrier" and go for SMS.
The word "Mac" encompasses all of those, just fyi.
If even Apple says iMessage isn’t used by at least 45 million EU citizens… (to qualify for gatekeeper status)
I think they’re quite happy with “iMessage“ and “everything else“.
RCS will stay in the second bucket with the same green color.
I personally see no limit to what arbitrary nonsense regulation the EU is willing to push.
It doesn’t fix the end to end encryption problem unless google opens up their system.
Huh, pleasantly surprised Apple is taking up the mantle on something cross-platform. Nice.
Carriers like AT&T and Vodafone that were early to adopt RCS never even managed to interoperate with other RCS carriers - you could only send RCS to other AT&T subscribers, or other Vodafone subscribers. Then they all gave up and just adopted Google's servers. So now RCS just means "Google Jibe".
It's a failed standard. It never worked.